


can't imagine anything that's worth the dreaming

by majesdane



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-08
Updated: 2010-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:58:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/majesdane/pseuds/majesdane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She's not sure if she can handle this.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	can't imagine anything that's worth the dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [The Bechdel Test ficathon](). | Prompt: _Ivy worrying that she may be a doll too._

She's not sure if she can handle this.

Finding out that Dr. Saunders -- Claire, she has to remind herself, calling her Dr. Saunders or even Saunders like Topher does, seems too formal, as if there's a need for it here -- was a Doll was shocking, to say the least. Troubling, at best.

No, not at best. Not at all at best. Ivy didn't think there could be a 'best' in this sort of situation. There was only 'least.' It was shocking, troubling, and a whole other slew of things, but most of all, it was something Ivy didn't really want to know.

Not like she cared, on the whole. A Doll was just a Doll and of course they had to be convincing, had to believe who they themselves were so that everyone else would to. They had to be real. And of course: waste not. A damaged Doll could do a lot of good in a Dollhouse that was missing its original doctor. Why decommission Whiskey when Dr. Saunders -- the real Dr. Saunders -- could be put to good use?

That in itself made sense. She got that part.

It wasn't so much really a lack of understanding, it was more like . . . Well, she didn't really know. There was something horrifying about the whole thing. To just wake up one day and realize that you're the very thing you're trying to create. Or take care of, in Whiskey's -- Claire's. Claire's. Dr. Saunders' -- case. To know that you're not real. Just an imprint. Someone else, or maybe even dozens, hundreds of someone elses.

(And if Whiskey -- Claire -- could be an imprint, then really, couldn't anyone?)

Ivy tried to reason with herself. She had gone to school. And not just any school, but one of the top medical schools in the country. She knew the human brain inside and out and maybe she wasn't a genius like Topher, but she was fairly intelligent all the same or so she liked to think. She knew the layout of her hometown, remembered every crack and line and smudge on the walls of her bedroom at home, just outside Los Angeles. She remembered friends, family, people she hadn't seen in years.

But of course -- a Doll would know that too. It wouldn't be real (not most of it, anyway), but it would feel real, to the Doll. And of course everyone would just go along with it because why wouldn't they? Everyone acted as though Claire was real.

 

;;

 

"Don't you worry about it?" Ivy asks her, aiming for nonchalance and missing by a mile. "I mean, don't you worry about the fact that you're, you know -- I mean, that what you -- "

Claire looks at her with sad, knowing eyes. "That I'm not real, you mean."

"Well, you are sort of real, aren't you?" Ivy says and wonders if she could possibly make this conversation any worse. "I mean, Dr. Saunders, he was real. And you're -- well, human. I mean, you're really . . . real."

"You and I both know it's not the same," Claire says, resigned. "But it doesn't matter. I like who I am."

Ivy bites her lip. "But you don't know who you are," she says, and hates herself for it.

There's a horribly long, heavy pause, and then Claire says, "I know who I am. I don't know who I was before, but I know who I am now. That's what counts, I think. It's a different sort of knowing, but it's knowing all the same. I'm happy with this life. I'm not interested in the life I had before."

But it's the whole thing about knowing, Ivy wants to say. How can you just be okay, knowing that the personality, memories, life you've got aren't the same ones that came attached to the body you were born with.

She doesn't know how to ask that, though, and just stands there awkwardly, wringing her hands.

"You shouldn't worry, you know," Claire says after a moment, looking back up from her file, pen poised in the air to mark something off on a chart.

"Worry? About what?"

When Claire smiles, it stretches the scar along her lip; a thick, white line. "You're not a Doll," she says. "You're really just plain you. Just Ivy and no one else."

(But of course, they would say that to a Doll, wouldn't they?)


End file.
